Caught between a rock and a hard place because your laptop's
too heavy to haul around and your palmtop doesn't provide
enough performance for road trips? Or maybe those airline tray
tables in coach class are too small to accommodate your smart
high-end notebook with its 12-inch display.

A handful of computer manufacturers are filling the gap with a
new product category called "mininotebooks." Portable and
lightweight, they're ideal for working on standard office
applications while out of the office. Using Windows 95 or 98, they
perform the same basic functions as your desktop PC and are compact
and slender enough to fit into the smallest briefcase. While they
by no means replace high-end notebooks, the latest mininotebooks
are fully functional machines equipped with powerful multimedia
technology.

In terms of design, these new additions to the computer market
are both elegant and slim. Among the newest mininotebooks are
Sony's colorful models, which feature a trendy purple and gray
magnesium casing. And Sony's VAIO 505G and 505GX models are a
mere one-inch thick.

The biggest drawback of the latest mininotebooks is their price.
But when you consider that your business may require the kind of
benefits they offer, and that their 2- to 3-pound weight means you
can easily bring them with you to lunch, to the beach or aboard a
plane, their current average prices of $2,000 to $2,500 may be
worth the investment.

"We developed our low-power chip to give users longer
battery life," says Jeff McCrea, product marketing manager for
Intel's mobile and handheld products group. "While
standard-sized notebooks run at 233 MHz and 266 MHz, you can run
minis at 120 MHz and use the same applications, while conserving
battery power."

Most mininotebooks have a 1GB or 1.5GB hard drive that provides
plenty of storage to run numerous applications, and their average
16MB to 24MB RAM accommodates even the most complex spreadsheets.
The Hitachi VisionBook Traveler can be upgraded to 40MB RAM, and it
features an 8.4-inch screen that's wide enough to view the full
width of a typical word processing page. The standard version has
three Type II PC card slots, or can accommodate one Type II and one
Type III PC card.

The keyboards on mininotebooks are smaller than those of
standard notebooks, but decidedly larger than those on palmtops.
Most feature up to 84 keys (standard desktop keyboards have 104
keys). Almost all mininotebooks also have ports for connecting a
desktop keyboard and monitor--a useful feature when you're back
in the office.

The average built-in display measures 8 inches. At press time,
the largest screen on a mininotebook was the 11.3-inch display on
Sharp's Actius A100 UltraLite Notebook. Most mininotebooks also
have a port for connecting a standard mouse in case you don't
want to rely on the machine's built-in pointing device. The
Toshiba Libretto 70CT and 100CT models offer a small pointing
device built into the inside of the lid, with two clicker buttons
on the side. The mouse stick on Mistubishi's AMiTY CN is
located in the center of the keyboard, with clicker buttons below
the space bar.

Ports expand the capabilities of mininotebooks, allowing you to
connect peripherals, such as printers and digital cameras. Both
Toshiba models offer an optional Enhanced Port Replicator, which is
a bar-like device that contains all the ports for the mininotebook
and snaps onto the back of the machine. This way you can hook your
peripherals to the replicator simultaneously and remove them when
necessary, instead of attaching each connector individually every
time. Here's a list of the ports and standard interfaces
featured on the five models in our chart: